Subject: Re: PROPOSAL: removal of brk()/sbrk().
To: None <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: David Laight <david@l8s.co.uk>
List: tech-kern
Date: 02/26/2002 17:16:46
On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 03:44:30PM +0100, Wolfgang Solfrank wrote:
>
> What about programs that dump themselves for later restart (like emacs,
> TeX etc.)?
>
> Those programs dump the memory from the start of the data section
> up to the break value as the data section of the new executable.
> How would this be handled in the new world?
By fixing the programs so they dont do it :-)
Sendmail used to do that with its config file, however if
you breathed on the system it ended up with a complete mess!
It was presumably all ok until shared libraries came along.
If a program wants to save compiled config files, it should generate a data
area that contains no absolute addresses and write that to a file - it can
then be mmap()ed readonly and shared to anywhere in memory.
David
--
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk